Hi there,
We are excited to share that earlier this year SundayGrids raised around ₹2.8 Cr in seed round of fundraising from Rainmatter Capital, the incubator and investment fund of Zerodha which focuses on technology applications in the climate and finance space.
SundayGrids enables people to go to solar over the internet.
SundayGrids is building a digital solar platform, that lets users reduce their power bill by reserving fractions of solar systems that are deployed elsewhere. When users reserve, they receive solar credits on a monthly basis for the power produced from their fraction. These solar credits can be used to offset against their power bill through our platform.
Users get to reserve solar panel capacity that they need from projects SundayGrids install on spaces of our commercial partners who pay a per-unit tariff for the power from the system.
This billed amount is disbursed pro rata among our users as solar credits based on their reservation, which can be used to discount their power bill. The main advantage of this model of solar credits is that credits can be transferred digitally unlike say, direct power that requires a wired output and hence your solar capacity no longer have to be limited within your physical space.
Digital Solar can be accessible from our site www.sundaygrids.com. Once reserved, users can monitor and manage their allocation from a dashboard and use their solar credits at the end of the month to offset part of, or fully, their power bills from the 70+ power providers integrated into the platform.
<aside> ☝ Read more here about how Digital Solar is different from traditional Rooftop Solar
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Beyond the scope of reducing power bills (who wouldn’t want to!?), there is a strong interest in switching to renewables as both macro and individual scale climate action. However, a lot of that interest (for which younger, urban demographics are a key driver) is left unfulfilled, primarily because access is a huge constraint.
Bridge to India, one of the prominent solar industry publications in the country, put it this way in their recent report;
“A significant proportion of urban affluent population does not also have access to rooftop rights or is unwilling to make a long-term cost commitment. Households attach a very high financial (ability to expand the building vertically) and/ or social value (space for leisure, utility needs) to rooftop, where available, restricting growth prospects (for solar).”
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With the platform, SundayGrids aims to decouple going solar from the physical constraints around the user; enabling those who live in apartment buildings or as tenants, with no access to roof and even for those who have heavily shaded or well used roofs, to go solar without the hassles of installation.
We believe that making energy products accessible and convenient is fundamental to accelerating the transition to better and cleaner energy infrastructure.
We started in early 2021 with integrating a pilot 5kW system to an early prototype of the platform. In the span of that year, we were able to build out the necessary foundations of the service as well as got our first system fully subscribed.
Moving forward, this year we are expanding our capacity-building pipeline, aiming to bring in 500 kW systems into our pipeline. Meanwhile we are also doubling down on our efforts to bring the messaging and product functions accessible across multiple touchpoints.